San Jose Museum of Art Brings New Perspectives to Walking with Other Walks, Other Lines

The subject matter of San Jose Museum of Art’s new exhibition may surprise you. Other Walks, Other Lines, running now until March 10, 2019 explores the act of walking from multiple perspectives. Often the mundane nature of a task such as walking—something most of us do everyday without thinking—belies deeper characteristics, namely that walking is at once individualistic and inherently political. “The role of artists is to force us to consider things that we’d otherwise do thoughtlessly,” says SJMA Curator Lauren Schell Dickens. The art presented in Other Walks, Other Linesdoes just that.

Other Walks, Other Lines was originally inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Says Solnit, “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.” For author Solnit and other artists interested in psychogeography (the exploration of urban areas by walking without intent, or “drifting”), walking grounds us in time and space. The last century has seen an explosion of technological advances that aim to make our lives faster under the guise of convenience. Where as planes, subways and our smart phones separate us for the corporeal world, walking literally brings us back to earth. “On foot,” says Solnit, “everything stays connected.”

Curated by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator; Rory Padeken, associate curator; and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate Other Walks, Other Linesis a broad and free form exhibition. The exhibition’s presentation allows visitors the chance to engage with a wide range of the artists whose work over the last 30 years has re-examined walking and its ramifications. “In today’s heightened political climate, artists have begun to think of walking in terms of immigration, pilgrimage and access,” Curator Dickens says of the exhibition. This is especially the case in video works by artists such as Hiwa K, an Iraqi of Kurdish descent who fled Iraq on foot in 1996 before settling in Germany, and Paulo Nazareth, the Brazilian artist famous for his multi-year walks. Through their experiences the concepts of Diaspora and Immigration become movingly personal.

Lara Schnitger, Suffragette City procession in Dresden. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Photo by Swen Rudolph.

While Curator Dickens notes that many shows have examined walking in the past, most have concentrated on the 1960s and 70s, when artists were curious how the use of action creates art. Other Walks, Other Lines veers from this concentration by showcasing artists whose use of walking has far more political implications about how we see the world mapped around us. Says Lordy Rodriguez, whose specially commissioned piece highlights significant marches and migration routes from across the world and throughout time, “The question of reality and the different interpretations of what is ‘real’ are contained in the map.” Inspired by San Jose’s Women’s March in 2017 and the March For Our Lives in 2018, Rodriguez created integrated maps commemorating the routes taken in San Jose, walks that can be retraced by museum goers looking to remember these important events.

A second commissioned piece is Inactionby Brendan Fernandes, a Nairobi born dancer and choreographer. Performed by San Jose’s New Ballet Studio Company, Inaction explores the boundaries and thresholds within SJMA’s building. Over two performance dates in February (2/21/19, 6 p.m. and 2/23/19, 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.), visitors can witness the authority inherent to the way in which professional ballet dancers walk, showcased in a richly choreographed piece that moves all around the museum itself.

Elsewhere in Other Walks, Other Lines, the exhibition is one of the first to explore the access and ability aspect of walking. Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang uses her grandmother’s walker as a way to question how mobility affects us. Central to Kang’s work is jeongganbo, a grid-based form of Korean musical notation developed in the fifteenth century that extends to rhythm in poetry and choreography. In sculpture and performance, Kang explores bodily movement within geometric space. In terms of access, the work of Allora & Calzadilla uses subversive acts like protesting alongside activists in Vieques to explore how land access has shaped history and geopolitics.

Really great art regenerates the perception of reality.

The processional performance Suffragette City is also part of Other Walks. Suffragette City is a piece by Los Angeles-based artist Lara Schnitger that celebrates female empowerment by organizing a parade of graphically bold banners, anthropomorphic ritual objects, and wearable sculptures inspired by the uniforms and clothing the suffragettes have worn over the decades. Visitors of all ages are encouraged to participate by marching around the streets of San Jose with objects taken from the exhibition the week before the 2019 Women’s March. As Curator Dickens notes, “If you have an exhibition about walking, you need to encourage the visitors to walk!”

The sprawling nature of the exhibition mirrors the philosophy behind Psychogeography itself, collecting works by artists from around the globe over the exhibition’s six sections. Pilgrimage and Psychogeography features artists like Ginny Bishton, who creates meticulous photo collage and pen and ink drawings that connect habitual activities, like walking, with deeper dives into Minimalist and Conceptual Art. For Meaning and Ordinariness, Japanese artists and detritus collector Yuji Agematsu presents works culled from over 30 years of obsessively walking the streets of New York City. The exhibition’s third section Citizens of the Streets: Processions and Protests features a video performance piece by Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo. In her celebrated work ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?), the artist walks barefoot throughout Guatemala City with a bucket of human blood. Other sections of the exhibition present the work of superminimalist conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto, and examine the Nomadic Studio Sketchbooks of American artist Brad Kahlhamer, among many others.

The sixth section, Other Walks, is actually a show within a show (ending February 17th). This mini show presents the work of celebrated Mexican Artist Gabriel Orozco and is an in-depth look at thewalking-related photographs and videos of this singular artist. Of his work, Orozco says, “What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again. Really great art regenerates the perception of reality.”

As a whole Other Walks, Other Lines hopes to inspire its viewers to slow down. In a city such as San Jose, walking is a deliberate choice, a choice that can inspire an entirely different and rich viewpoint of the objects that one passes by absent-mindedly everyday. By slowing down, we are able to think more critically about the stories we’re told about the way borders operate, react more empathetically to those who walking is their only mode of migration, whether to cross town or to cross an entire continent, and hopefully, inspire a demand that our governing bodies recognize how access and ability directly effects not just populations as a whole, but people’s lives individually.

For those interested in an immersive experience, SuffragetteCity on January 12 promises just that. Free and open to the public, join the parade through downtown San José to celebrate female empowerment. To register for free, click here.

For a further examination of the concepts behind the art, such as a reading lists, as well as reservations, visit sjmusart.org.